Fantasy & Science Fiction

Opening the September issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF) is like stepping out of a time machine into a cosier, chrome-finned reality. Compare the latest issue’s cover design and its interior typography with some of the early examples and revel in the conceptual continuity. When I first glanced at its curious, old-fashioned Contents page I felt I’d fallen backwards into my adolescence; Mad magazines and Marvel comics carrying back-page classified ads for sea monkeys and 3D glasses.

But then again, US publishers have always tended towards the conservative. And before I’m accused of anti-Americanism, I will also add that US small press publications generally boast a higher standard of subediting and more professional production values than their European or Australasian counterparts. This issue of F&SF contains what must be a rare subediting error at the top of page 154. It’s standard practice for the authors of stories published in even small press US magazines to be sent proofs to correct, so “this shop will be remain standing” may have been introduced by the writer and missed by the sub. I was also a little disappointed to find on the final page, “The minimal plot centers around…” Something “centring around” something else is perpetuated by those who utter nonsense of the “very unique” variety on TV cookery shows, so Douglas A. Anderson should know better.

I’m nitpicking, I know. That F&SF is a premier-league genre fiction publication is immediately obvious from the quality of its ongoing contributors. That it has managed to survive as a monthly print magazine since 1949 is nothing short of a miracle in this part of the world, where local fantasy and science fiction writers struggle to find publishers because they are told there is no market for either. Meanwhile, UK agents and publishers say 40 percent of their fantasy and SF sales come from Australasia. Go figure.

Bryn Barnard’s cover illustration for one of the more accomplished stories in this issue (Ted Chiang’s ‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’), although proficiently executed, appears a little too generic and, unless I’m mistaken, doesn’t depict a scene in the story.

The issue opens with Andrew Jablokov’s magic realism piece ‘Wrong Number’, which he says was inspired by a car he once owned and a garage called Uncle Russ’s. He launches straight into the action and it’s vaguely reminiscent of some of Stephen King’s short stories. But too much of the exposition occurs through the dialogue. The transformative vehicle driven into the story is a shamanic mechanic who prescribes the gluing of a crude replica cufflink to the inside of a car’s engine to act as a magical charm. This is to protect our protagonist, Stephanie, from a cufflinked man she fobbed off with an incorrect phone number because he came on to her at a party. In the context of the story it reads as implausibly as it does here. I can’t help thinking this story might have worked better in the form of a short screenplay.

Charles De Lint’s column, ‘Books to look out for’, is followed directly by James Sallis’s ‘Books’, and the two could easily have been merged; after all, Sallis’s reviews are not about books one should avoid at all costs. He gives NZBC friend Paul di Filippo a mention, for example, for his stories ‘Personal Jesus’ in The Solaris Book of Science Fiction and ‘Wikiworld’ in the Fast Forward 1 anthology (which was also Boing Boinged). These reviews unnecessarily interrupt the flow of the fiction, and one can’t help wondering why both books and films don’t form a discrete reviews section of the magazine.

We’re soon back to the fiction with ‘Envoy Extraordinary’, written by Albert E. Cowdrey, who used to work at the US Army Center of Military History. Cowdrey may have a grasp of diplomacy but he suddenly jerks us out of what we assume to be a third-person viewpoint focusing on our apparent hero, Vincent Khartoum (although we ‘hear’ his thoughts as well as experiencing his actions), to one of an omniscient narrator. We discover Vincent has been booby-trapped by Second Secretary Balabanov in order to kill sleazy tyrant King Drax, but the shift is just too jarring; in the final two pages we’re suddenly privy to Vincent’s parents’ beliefs. Although it has been skilfully told until then, that fault-line in the plot cheats us and it’s a shame.

Heather Lindsley’s story ‘Atalanta Loses at the Interpantheonic Trivia Bee’ is almost as exhausting as its title. It weighs in at around 3500 words and just isn’t substantial enough to support them all on the strength of its one-liner premise: some Greek gods including Aphrodite, Athena and Artemis are putting together a team to compete in the aforementioned trivia contest, but need a human on the team because “it’s in the rules”. The story is told charmingly enough, but the gag has paled even before the introduction of a question to which the answer is the Spice Girls.

John Langan’s contribution, ‘Episode Seven: Last Stand Against the Pack in the Kingdom of the Purple Flowers’ is, as its title suggests, post-apocalyptic. It’s 27 pages long (around 8000 words) and is told in a single sentence — if you don’t count the essential colons and question marks — punctuated largely through the use of dashes in one virtually breathless paragraph. If you think that might get tiring, it soon does. The gimmickry intrudes unnecessarily on Langan’s craft as a storyteller. Anyone writing post-apocalyptic fiction set in the States inevitably owes a debt to Stephen King’s groundbreaking novel The Stand, and Langan’s story opens with an epigraphical quotation from The Alarm’s song of the same name.

Kevin N. Haw’s ‘Requirements for the Mythology Merit Badge’ is a far more successful attempt at joking around with mythology than Lindsley’s; largely because it’s shorter (around 750 words), funnier and written in list style.

Lucius Shepard’s film reviews, under the heading ‘Once were movies’, open with a crushing denunciation of Lee Tamahori’s Next, an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s story ‘The Golden Man’. Shepard also has a detailed dissection of Grindhouse, the Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez collaboration, and he doesn’t like that much, either. He’s more upbeat about Alex Infascelli’s Hate 2 0 and the long-overdue DVD release of Alejandro Jodorowdky’s cult movie El Topo.

One of two highlights in this issue of F&SF is prolific author Robert Reed’s ‘If We Can Save Just One Child…’, which might be described as a ribofunk thriller of genetics, in a world where the only true taboo left is cloning people without their consent and where the elderly and sick are routinely given tissues and organs grown from stem cells. We’re set up to believe that Gary Olsen has been mistaken for a paedophile while trying to collect his son, Pepper, from school. Sub-plots are elegantly revealed through interwoven narrative rather than indigestible chunks of back-story. A mother agonises over what she believes to be a crude device to steal her child’s DNA, installed on a slide at the playground; a boy teases his younger brother, Evan, telling him he was born in Brazil as a clone raised by cannibals. It’s hard to fault this story, which has a twist at the end when Evan confronts Olsen, the man he suspects of illegally pedalling DNA. I won’t spoil it, except to say that Reed paces it expertly and doesn’t allow hints of comedy to undermine the tension he has lacquered, layer-on-layer and glass-hard, over his artful narrative.

I didn’t much enjoy Paul Doherty and Pat Murphy’s column about Second Life and the ’Splo — an “Exploratorium” Doherty built for this online metaverse — mainly because this multi-player role-playing game has lost any appeal it might once have had through its sheer time-wasting potential. There is also something oddly ‘retro’ about the way in which it is written; it reminds me strongly of computing and gaming articles from Mondo 2000 magazine in the early 1990s. If you’re a Second Life addict you’ll doubtless feel differently and may even be convinced by Doherty’s bold claim that “things you experience in Second Life can change your brain”. I’m too busy trying to change my brain by what I do in my first life, such as reading good speculative fiction.

‘The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate’ by Ted Chiang is the other long story (approaching 8000 words), but it’s a gem. Set in Baghdad, its structure follows the ‘story within a story’ framing device of The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, consisting as it does of three connected tales embedded within the main one. It’s more fantasy than science fiction, but the author says it was partly inspired by the work of physicist Kip Thorne; famous for his controversial theory that wormholes might be used for time travel. I don’t pretend to understand physics well enough to decide whether the “many worlds” interpretation of quantum mechanics, tangent universes or restricted action resolution could explain how, in Chiang’s story, time-travellers cause a single item of jewellery, transported from two points in the future to a point in the past, to exist in triplicate. Perhaps Thorne’s theory — that any situation in a time travel story permits many consistent solutions — is correct. But if it isn’t, it doesn’t make Chiang’s story any less entertaining.

It would have been more satisfying if this were a mix of long, short and short-short fiction — nowadays, I consider a 5000-word story to be quite long enough — but balance is the most difficult thing to strike in any magazine. F&SF’s “Coming attractions” will include a story by the great San Francisco author Robert Silverberg, so it deserves a revisit if only to read that.

A single issue of F&SF costs US$4.50, but a year’s worth (that’s 11-issues for $3 each) on Amazon will set you back just $32.97. If you’re trying to establish yourself as a fantasy or science fiction author, you could do worse than invest in a F&SF subscription to find out what’s new at the forefront of your chosen genre. The editors seem to have a preference for mythologies and creation myths rather than hard sci-fi, but don’t be swayed by genre typecasting — this is a magazine of literature, and these days you will find even the MSM grudgingly conceding that science fiction may have had a greater impact on the way we live than any other literary genre of the 20th century. Science fiction has often foreshadowed science fact, and that’s no fantasy. For that we can thank institutions such as F&SF.

Click here to read other blog reviews of F&SF.